A comparison between Q1 2023 and Q1 2024 reveals marketing technology funding plummeting from $13.2 billion to $1.8 billion, although the latter was an increase on the $699 million figure for Q4 2023. New product announcements were up over 100% on the previous quarter. Interestingly, investment in productivity/workflow and web performance/security both outstripped investment in AI.
Retail and hospitality customer engagement platform Givex has added the ability to create comprehensive customer profiles that include interaction data from other systems. The new product, GivexEngageAI, also develops customer segments, executes marketing campaigns, and recommends next best actions. The company refers to it as a CDP and it does appear to tick all of our boxes.
Measures to ensure ads do not appear adjacent to negative content may serve no purpose. That’s the conclusion of research conducted by HarrisX for marketing network Stagwell Global. Ads appearing alongside stories about politics, inflation and crime performed no worse than ads appearing adjacent to sports, entertainment or business stories (based on a survey of almost 50,000 U.S. adults).
Disney has agreed to license more than 200 characters, costumes, and environments (but not voices or talent likenesses) to OpenAI for Sora, its gen AI video platform. This is highly unusual for Disney, which generally sues AI models for copyright infringement; in fact, it sued Google for that a day before announcing the OpenAI deal. Disney will also invest $1 billion in OpenAI, nicely illustrating how very eager they are to join the AI party.